Angeline's embers

Her Ma and Da, baby brother Noely Joseph, grannies, caring neighbours, snotty residents, dirt, cold, hunger, anger . . . Waiting for Angeline Kearns Blain to arrive, the interdependent community in her autobiography, Stealing Sunlight, swirl around in my mind. What has happened to them since? Then the writer arrives in the hotel lounge, tearful.

"The taxi driver knew Noely Joseph, he was at his funeral in '92. I can't believe it. I happened to be in Ireland when my brother died - he was an alcoholic, and all the old neighbours clubbed together to give him a send-off. These were the sons and daughters of the people I grew up with, the same kindness coming through." ca change. Her bread-and-dripping, slop-bucket childhood story - as recounted in her autobiography, Stealing Sunlight - is part of an Ireland that now seems to have vanished. Angie, her parents and three brothers grew up in one room in O'Brien Place, a lane hidden behind Northumberland Road. There was no plumbing or electricity. Her father was a wireless operator in the Army, away for weeks on end and paid a pittance. Her mother and their neighbours did their best on half nothing.

Her book has echoes of Angela's Ashes, although the writing is simpler, less sentimental. It is dedicated to Neddy Kenny, who lived in the flats, worked for the gas company in Ringsend and came to her family's door each week with three sliced pans in his arms.

From as far back as she can remember, Angie felt dispossessed, unequal. "We went to school half-starved. What sin had I committed that I deserved such treatment? I felt so wounded," she says.

At school in Haddington Road, she was caned for not wearing the proper uniform, for having no money for copies, for not putting a penny each month in the box for the black babies. It meant that an escape route into learning was denied her. "I hated school. They should have showed us the love of God. I hate those nuns."

She tried to join Ringsend library. "You had to have the signatures of three householders. I got one - Mrs Cody from the shop signed the card for me - but that wasn't enough and they turned me away."

At the age of 12, she left school and, too young for a factory job, worked with other kids picking cinder at the Ringsend rubbish dump, braving maggots, rats and unmentionable detritus to earn a few bob.

"Working on the dump was terrible for a child," Angie recalls. "I remember Johnston Mooney and O'Brien used to throw bread and cakes there rather than giving it to the poor people. The kids would be waiting for it, but I could never touch it. I felt if I took the food they gave to the rats I would be saying something was okay that was totally unacceptable."

She was an angry teenager. "One day I went to Sandymount strand and knifed all the crabs: mother, father and baby crabs. That night, I woke up crying and felt I had murdered my family. I went to confession and he said: `You're a silly girl. You should be praying for the reconversion of Russia.' My relationship with organised religion ended right then."

She became an ice-cream girl in the Regent cinema, which sounds glamorous, or at least cosy. "Yes, but think of a bright young girl in darkness from two o'clock in the afternoon till 10 at night for 19-and-six a week.

" The manager was trying it on with me, and I couldn't say anything at home, 'cos Ma needed the money. Da was drinking. I wanted to be drama teacher, a writer, a dancer - I knew I could never have any of that. So I began getting a large bottle of cider and sipping away at work to dull the pain." At 18, Angie and two other cinema ushers embarked on an unlikely plan, influenced, she says, by the roles assigned to men and women in American movies. They would each grab one of the GIs who were to be seen in 1950s Dublin looking for a bit of R&R with an Irish cailin.

Incredibly, the plan worked. One pal married a Texan, the other now lives in Australia. Angie saw her GI one day standing at a bus stop. "I stood beside him, pretended I was waiting too, and began to talk. He wanted to go to Fairview and was at the wrong stop. We walked very slowly across O'Connell Bridge and, by the time we got to his stop, we had a date for the next day."

Within a year, they were married and, at just 18, she was flying off to a new life. Ed Lyon was 24, an engineer from New England. "He fell in love with me. I thought I loved him. He was kind and considerate and my ticket out," Angie says.

The transition to middle-class puritan New England was traumatic. "I was shocked and scared. I could cook a few rashers and sausages, I went shopping for them, but the food was all packaged. I began copying the other wives, but after the full-blooded women I knew, I found them very docile. They had their degrees, but had put them in their pockets in order to keep house. I had no education and was starving for one."

She had three sons by her early 20s and tried to be the dutiful wife. But something was dying inside. "At 25, I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for depression. Every time the psychiatrist held my hand, I just cried and cried. He said: `Let the dam burst, Angie.' But I felt so guilty. I could never tell my family at home; I was letting everyone down. I felt I was my husband's property, I had been bought and paid for."

At 38, by which time her sons were making their own way, Angie went back to school, sitting with children at special classes run by the local community. "It was embarrassing for my husband. Here was Ed's wife going to school, but for me the time for false shame was over. I loved learning, it was better than sex."

Having graduated from high school, she enrolled at Idaho State University, travelling 500 miles a week, taking her degree and, later, a Masters in sociology.

She knew her marriage was over even before she met the leftwing academic, Michael Blain. "It was lust at first sight and then I fell in love for the first time in my life. We ran away together. My sons were upset but understood, but it broke my husband's heart. He really loved me, but I guess he laughed 10 times in 20 years. He still wanted the sweet Irish cailin and I knew if I had to continue to play that role, I would go insane."

Today, Angie works as Adjunct Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies in Boise State University, Idaho. It's a working-class university, and she looks with recognition at many of the students from deprived backgrounds in her classes. Home in Dublin for the publication party (at Ringsend library, where else?), Angie, now in her 60s, revisited old haunts. "O'Brien Place is gone, condemned as unfit for human habitation; there are yuppie houses there instead. I drove through it, but I didn't get out - too painful," she says.

Her eyes fill with tears. Her brother Bob is dead, her other brother, Frank, lives in Ballyfermot, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. Her parents are buried in Deansgrange with a proper gravestone.

Why did she write the book? "I had to make sense out of my upbringing in Ireland, to understand why I was a wounded person for so long."

The book was cathartic, but she is still angry. "I am angry at the Irish State that promoted the civil service class at the expense of the dispossessed working-class. I am angry at the church, who deprived us of learning and opportunity, then burdened us with borrowing from money-lenders for First Holy Communion and Confirmation.

"Visiting Dublin now is a strange experience. Nobody holds their nose at a smelly, raggedy girl any more. I can go into Clerys; you were never allowed in. I feel I am a different person, but the same person: Angeline the waif and Angeline the professor. Everyone is very swanky and talking as if they had elocution lessons. I don't see any poor people. I wonder are they still there but just as invisible as they were in the 1950s?

"If I had stayed, I would be dead now," she says. "I had nothing to live for here. My mother used to take us into cake shops; she couldn't afford to buy the cake, so she bought us a slice. She wanted us to have a taste of the best. But I knew I would never have been satisfied with crumbs.

"I had glimpses of another world. If it was closed to me, if I could not have climbed over that wall, I would not have lived behind it. I would have killed myself rather than that".

Stealing Sunlight by Angeline Kearns Blain is published by A&A Farmar, £9.99.